The Deserted Wife, the Monk's Ladder: On Gillian Rose's Derrida

In recent years, a number of philosophers, theologians, and critical theorists have begun to return to the work of the British philosopher Gillian Rose, who died in 1995. Since last summer especially, after Verso published Marxist Modernism, a transcription of early lectures on the Frankfurt School, thinkers both within and without the academy have turned to Rose as a source for the renewal of left-wing thought and practice—a left way out of “left melancholy” (to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase), as the losses rapidly mount. In this paper, I want to join the growing conversation around Rose’s thought by considering her engagement, not with Marx, Hegel, or Adorno, but with a figure Rose repeatedly held up as the embodiment of everything she did not want her philosophy to be: Derrida. My aim is not to prove that Rose’s readings of Derrida were wrong, or right, but to figure out what “Derrida” meant to Rose, and what her war with him enabled her to say. Focusing on the essays collected in Judaism and Modernity (1993) and Mourning Becomes the Law (1996), I want to show that Rose’s rejections of Derrida were crucial to her readings of the tradition she called “Judaism,” and to her imagining of Judaism as a kind of modernism, one with as much political force in the present—in the 1990s, now—as Marxism. Crucial to Rose’s still unstudied turn to Judaism, I will show, is a turn to early Christian eschatology.

In the rereading of Benjamin offered in Judaism and Modernity, Rose introduces a distinction that will become central to her philosophy of mourning: “The aim of this […] reflection is to move from aberrated to inaugurated mourning,” Rose writes. Aberrated mourning, Rose argues, or left melancholy, is embodied by the halakhic figure of the agunah: the wife deserted by her husband, stuck in a state of waiting for him to return. Against the statically open-ended mourning of the agunah, whose gaze remains fixed on the horizon, inaugurated mourning—what Maya Krishnan calls Rose’s Hegelian philosophy of mourning—means taking the risk of returning your eyes to the present, looking your loss in the face, going on. In Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose rethinks the deserted wife of Jewish law in the figure of Derrida (combining the agunah with a modern theatrical reincarnation of a key female figure from ancient Greek tragedy):“[…] like Elektra, mourning becomes Derrida.” Retreating into a “Judaic state of desertion,” in which nothing can be risked, because everything remains lost, the agunah named Derrida finds an escape from the demands of history in everlasting mourning, allowing mourning to congeal into an identity. “This is no work of mourning,” Rose writes of Derrida’s working through of Heidegger’s Nazism—her anger clear—but self-paralyzing melancholia.

In a short footnote in Mourning Becomes the Law, and only there, Rose names Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia as the model for her distinction between inaugurated mourning and aberrated mourning. (Rose’s intense absenting of Freud, as she uses him, will be tied up with her uses of Derrida.) In Judaism and Modernity, and again in Mourning Becomes the Law, she footnotes the psychoanalytic theorist Laurence Rickels’s Aberrations of Mourning (1988) as the source for her concept of aberrated mourning. But it is only in Mourning Becomes the Law, as Rose restages Derrida’s pretend mourning of Heidegger, that she footnotes a source for her peculiar-sounding concept of inaugurated mourning: the inaugurated eschatology outlined in John Climacus’s Ladder of Divine Ascent (c. 600 CE). Is this a joke—an easter egg? A winking nod to Rose’s preferred Kierkegaardian author? With the increasingly high modernism of her prose, Rose could be felt to be a writer after Joyce in this moment, trailing puzzles meant to keep the professors busy for centuries. But that is not how she asks us to read her: her texts are meant to be works, labors to be labored through in order to get somewhere, not beautiful, but difficult. And difficult not in order to mystify, nor to avoid speaking, but to involve her reader in the endless back-and-forth of mutual (mis)recognition.

In the first part of this paper, then, I will trace Rose’s working out of a philosophy of mourning by way of her repeated rejections of Derrida’s “Judaic” melancholia. My reading will be attentive to Derrida as a key character in Rose’s Hegelian comedy of errors (her antidote to the looped Trauerspiel of the twentieth-century Jewish left), and to Rose’s invention of philosophical caricatures. (Levinas, no less a source of disgust for Rose than Derrida, though less close to home, will embody something she names “Buddhist Judaism.”) Engaging with Vincent Lloyd’s recent work on Rose, I will trace the ways in which Derrida’s “Judaism” negatively grounds Rose’s Jewish—Christian—philosophy of mourning. In the second part of the paper, I will take Rose’s footnoting of Climacus’s Ladder seriously, arguing for the ways in which certain strains of Christian eschatology and retreat inform Rose’s philosophy of mourning. Where Climacus aimed to teach his fellow monks that the blessings to come were, in a sense, already a present reality, Rose argues that Marxist thought should “aim to inaugurate radical democracy at every moment” (“and not postpone it to a post-revolutionary future”). I will consider the relationship between Climacus’s inaugurated eschatology, as it works for Rose, and the inaugurated eschatology of twentieth-century Protestant theology. Here, too, I will consider the relevance of Rose’s deathbed reception into the Church of England—a fact often passed over by her readers—for a reading of her earlier turn to Judaism.

As a last thought, I will return to Rose’s present, and then our own, considering the ways in which Rose’s caricature of Derrida—worshipping the unsayable, refusing to self-contaminate with the violence and work of reason—enables her to critique a postwar attitude she calls “Holocaust piety.” Politics will not begin, Rose suggests in the early 1990s, so long as we deny the ease with which the abused become the abusers.